Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you have no interest and don't have a business (maybe you don't even understand what that is), in case you have e-mail, you've experienced the uglier side of email marketing. You've probably even seen the ads for email address lists that provide thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change.
You can be sure of one thing: if the price is cheap, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these tremendous lists are loaded with “collected” email addresses. They're comparable to your set of street addresses chosen from your phone book.
Mainly, the addresses are picked from web logs, membership or student lists, newsgroups, message boards, forums, as well as other places where people gather to swap advice. They do not understand their addresses sold on the open market and are being gathered up. They didn't ask to be added to a mass e-mail list. And they definitely didn't ask to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Picking email addresses isn't illegal. But it's broadly considered unethical. You pay a fine or will not go to jail. Nevertheless, you might damage your company, maybe irreparably. The possible outcomes for violating the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range to having your business, from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain.